Installing Sohay is an ordinary WordPress plugin install. The part worth reading is what happens afterwards, because activating the plugin does not by itself give you a working chatbot — it gives you the screens you configure one from.
Installing
- Go to Plugins → Add New and search for Sohay.
- Click Install Now, then Activate.
- A new Sohay menu appears in your admin sidebar.
If you are installing from a zip instead, use Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, choose the file, and activate it the same way.
What activation actually does
Activating Sohay sets up the parts it needs and nothing you have to think about:
- Creates its database tables for conversations and messages.
- Registers the KB Articles post type and its category and tag taxonomies.
- Grants its five capabilities to the administrator role, so existing admins keep working with no migration.
- Flushes rewrite rules, so the public Knowledge Base URLs resolve straight away rather than 404-ing until you re-save permalinks.
What it does not do is start answering questions. There is no API key yet, and no articles to answer from.
What you should see
After activation, the Sohay menu holds:
- Dashboard — usage at a glance.
- Conversations — the inbox, empty for now.
- KB Articles and KB Categories — where your documentation lives.
- KB Settings — syncing, URLs, and the system prompt.
- AI Settings — provider, model, welcome message, and spend caps.
- Diagnostics — today’s token usage and recent log entries.
If the menu is missing entirely, the most likely cause is a PHP version below 8.1. Check Tools → Site Health before looking anywhere else.
Where to go next
Go to First-run setup, which covers choosing a provider, saving your API key, picking a model, and setting a daily spend cap.
